


and charybdis on the right

by vuvalinis



Series: morpheus verse [2]
Category: Motherland: Fort Salem (TV)
Genre: F/F, Rating May Change, post-post season one, violence and sexy stuff(TM) so please proceed with caution
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:41:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25895368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vuvalinis/pseuds/vuvalinis
Summary: It’s like being adrift in the middle of a river: on one side, there are civilians who despise her kind, witches who would turn her into their weapon, and sisters who want things she can’t give them.And on the other, just this. A warm bed, and her arms full of the girl who loves her.In which: war makes monsters of men (and women); and the only thing harder than staying together is trying not to fall apart.Sequel to "o morpheus (give me joy till morning)"
Relationships: Raelle Collar/Scylla Ramshorn
Series: morpheus verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1831897
Comments: 45
Kudos: 149





	and charybdis on the right

**Author's Note:**

> She's back! This is the sequel to "o morpheus (give me joy till morning)," which will once again be in four parts. I would advise you to read the tags, as, in terms of content, it's a bit different, and the rating may end up getting bumped up later down the line.
> 
> I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to @holeybubushka, without whom this could not have been written. Thanks for being there for me every step of the way and always being willing to bounce ideas, scream, or just send gifs of Scylla. (Those are very very important.) Also, you are brilliant, and everyone reading this right now needs to go read [All Roads Lead Back to You and Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25178905) immediately.
> 
> And for Hayley, who _has_ seen mfs now, and whose reaction to chapter one was "it wasn't really porn they talked about their feelings half the time." you're the absolute best all the time, and it's u and me, babey.

* * *

> It’s not that you should never love something so much that it can control you. It’s that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled. It’s not a weakness. It’s your best strength.
> 
> —Patrick Ness, _The Ask and the Answer_

* * *

They’re ten thousand feet above central Maine—ETA ten minutes to the drop site—when Raelle first senses the approaching storm.

Later, when she tries to send her mind back to that moment, she won’t remember what triggered it. Won’t be able to say for sure what it was that made her sit up in her seat with the word _storm_ balanced on the tip of her tongue. Nor why the idea of a storm was so urgent: ordinarily, it wouldn’t make her bat an eye. Raelle’s no stranger to storms, and apart from a few she’s sung up herself, they don’t frighten her. That old line of the Army’s, about storm and fury being a witch’s birthright, has always made her roll her eyes, but she can’t deny that there’s truth to it. Even as a child in the Cession, she never understood why the neighbors’ children cried at the sound of thunder.

But now, everything’s different. Now, in the hot, close belly of the bat, with the sound of the rotors loud in her ears and this new, strange conviction pumping frantic through her bloodstream, Raelle pays attention. Because in their line of work, storms _mean_ something, and it isn’t always something good. Because if this is a true premonition, it appears to have skipped right over their Knower—Tally’s still glaring steadily out the window, the same way she’s been for the past hour—and that can’t mean anything good, either.

Because the sky on the other side of that window is a perfect, cloudless blue.

But mostly, if Raelle’s being honest, because of the mycelium. Because ever since it put down its roots in her, she’s imagined her body as an instrument being tuned to someone else’s ear. Because premonitory feelings like this one used to have any number of explanations—pre-drop jitters, or just plain old overthinking—but now, there are no explanations at all. Nothing but a voice in the back of her head, which every now and then wakes up and whispers: _this is important. Pay attention._

So Raelle listens. She doesn’t really have another choice. This power of hers is many things (most of which, she suspects, she doesn’t even _know_ about), but the one thing it is _not_ is willing to be ignored.

Funny how even now, when she’s _literally_ indestructible, she still seems to have so little power.

As if in agreement (or perhaps admonition), her right forefinger starts to prickle inside its glove. It’s been doing this more and more frequently over the past few weeks, to unpredictable ends; ordinarily, Raelle just waits for it to be over, but this time, she thinks _actually, screw it._ Maybe the mycelium won’t be ignored, but damned if she isn’t going to try anyway, because this is officially too fucking much. They’re minutes away from a combat drop. Tally’s in a mood. Abigail, in the seat next to Tally’s, is silently mouthing words, which probably means another goddamn _motivational speech_ is coming; and the whole situation is rapidly sliding towards a place where Raelle can’t control any part of it. She will _not_ lose control over her own body, too.

Without thinking—reverting back to kid logic, _if I can’t see it, it can’t see me_ —she shoves her hand under her right leg and lets the full weight of her body settle upon it. Which not only fails to crush the mycelium into submission (not that Raelle really thought that would _work_ , but still), it also immediately draws the attention of the person sitting beside her.

The one thing, in other words, Raelle has been trying to avoid at all costs.

Still, when Scylla reaches over and places a hand on her knee, it’s hard to remember _why_ it would be so bad for her to know about this. Because her touch instantly loosens some of the tension in Raelle’s body, the electricity beneath her skin dulling to a hum; and her eyes, blue like the hottest part of a flame, refuse to let Raelle go. And it would be easy, so easy, to just lose all of her worries, all of _herself_ , in this beautiful, brilliant girl who loves her. This beautiful, brilliant girl who, in spite of everything, is still right behind her, whenever Raelle looks over her shoulder.

 _You okay?_ Scylla mouths, interrupting her thoughts. Raelle watches her dart a look at Abigail and Tally, and that’s when she notices the worried little wrinkle between Scylla’s eyebrows, and the dark circles drawn beneath those blue, blue eyes. And she suddenly remembers, with perfect clarity, why she can’t bear to add one more thing to Scylla’s burden.

 _It’s nothing_ , she mouths back, shaking her head for emphasis.

Scylla frowns at her. She’s not buying it, because of _course_ she isn’t—really, Raelle should know better at this point than to try in the first place—but before she can say anything, Anacostia startles them all by banging open the hatch door and climbing out of the cockpit.

“Ladies,” she barks. “Eyes up here.”

Scylla squeezes Raelle’s knee and eases back into her own seat, with a look in her eye that clearly says _we’re talking about this later._ On the bench opposite them, Abigail and Tally sit up at attention, but Raelle can see the sluggishness laced through their movements. They look all used up already. Anacostia regards them for a moment, as well, then flicks her gaze to Raelle and Scylla—who probably, Raelle guesses, aren’t presenting in top form, either.

It’s been a month. An exhausting, discouraging, fucking _endless_ month.

Still, the way Anacostia closes her eyes and draws a deep breath at the sight of them isn’t very encouraging.

“Ladies,” she repeats, still with her eyes closed. “I want this op to be _clean_. Get in, survey, level the building, get out. No messes this time.” She opens her eyes at last and bores them into Raelle. Raelle’s half tempted to shoot back that she can’t be the _only_ one who makes messes—that’s the whole point of needing a strike team—but then Anacostia shifts her attention to Tally and adds, “Any shit not essential to this op, you leave that _behind_. Am I understood?”

Everyone but Tally drums their feet in assent. Tally, the subject of scrutiny (though not from her sisters or Scylla, who, Raelle notices, are all looking pointedly elsewhere), just stares back at Anacostia with a look of such utter blankness on her face, Raelle’s not convinced she’s heard a single word.

Anacostia looks like she’d dearly love to press the issue, but at the last minute, she draws in her lips and shakes her head. “Bellweather’s running point,” she says; it’s hard to tell under the noise of the rotors, but Raelle could swear that she sounds a little deflated, too. “Ramshorn’s with me. You three, salva. Drop in three.” She pauses for a long, drawn-out moment before adding, “Make me proud out there.”

She always says that at the end of her debriefs, even though, by Raelle’s estimation, they never once _have_.

Reluctantly, Raelle peels her hand out from under her leg and starts rummaging in her kit bag for her salva. The prickling in her finger has threaded itself with a vengeance all the way up to her wrist; it feels like a miniature lighting storm beneath the surface of her skin. She can feel, too, the weight of Scylla’s gaze on her hands in their gloves, which, even with Samhain two weeks away, it’s still not really cold enough for. But she doesn’t get a chance to dwell on either of these things, because as soon as the cockpit hatch closes behind Anacostia, Abigail startles them all by striking the cabin floor with her boot.

“Listen _up_ ,” she says loudly, and oh, God, here it comes. Out of the corner of her eye, Raelle sees Scylla bite her lip; she debates telling her preemptively to behave, but then Tally startles them both by slumping forward and audibly groaning.

“Can we _not_ this time, Abigail?” she asks, directing the question to her boots.

Abigail gives her a withering glare even though Tally can’t actually see it. Sort of an interesting tactic, Raelle thinks, considering it’s mostly Abigail’s fault that Tally’s in a mood in the first place. “Can _you_ let me do my _job?”_ she snaps.

Tally ignores her in favor of continuing to stare at her boots. Scylla, though, is smirking, and Raelle _knows_ she has a snarky comeback prepped and loaded. But they’ve been working together for a month now, and Abigail’s not an idiot; she knows what’s coming, and beats Scylla to it in a way Raelle can’t help but find impressive.

“You don’t drop, Necro, you don’t get an opinion,” she says through gritted teeth. Then swivels her glare toward Raelle for good measure, raising her eyebrows in challenge. _You got anything to add?_ she says with her eyes.

Raelle shrugs and waves her hands in surrender. It’s not like she loves this motivational crap, but she knows this is something Abigail feels like she has to do. Better to just let her get on with it.

Abigail nods, looking just a bit pleased with herself. _Rabble subdued_ , Raelle imagines her thinking. _Order restored_. “Listen up,” she repeats. “We all know we’ve taken some hits lately. Made some mistakes. Choked some ops.” There’s a tic in her jaw as she says this, but otherwise, she gives no indication of how much it cost her to admit. “But _we_ know that this team can work. Because we’re _strong_ together.”

For someone raised among the high society, it never fails to amuse Raelle how bad Abigail is at reading a room.

“So let’s go out there and _show_ them how strong we are.”

Mercifully short, then, at least. They dutifully stomp their feet in response, even Tally, but it lacks any sort of passion. Raelle can almost hear the converging threads of all their thoughts: _who in their right mind would think us strong_ now?

Abigail must hear it as well, because she rolls her eyes and slaps a salva tab on her neck with unnecessary force. “ _Or_ we could just shit the bed,” she snaps, her eyes already taking on a sheen of silver. “Whatever. Your choice.”

The worst motivational speech of all time thus concluded, she yanks open the cabin door. The air that comes rushing in is _loud_ , thick with the sound of the rotors’ thunder; Abigail leaps forward into it without so much as a backward glance. Tally follows a second later, hot on her heels like she can’t get out of the bat fast enough. Like she’s afraid, Raelle thinks uneasily, of being left behind.

Raelle knows she should follow right after—knows it drives Abigail crazy when she trails to earth behind them like an afterthought—but, like always, she hesitates.

And, like always, Scylla’s right behind her in an instant: folding her into her arms and gently fisting her hand around the hem of Raelle’s jacket. It’s absurdly endearing, but it also troubles Raelle in a way she can’t quite put into words—why Scylla holds her so tightly, in every way she can think of.

Maybe it’s something to do with the way Raelle’s been moving through the past month braced for the other shoe to drop. Maybe Scylla, too, feels that even this little bit of good can’t last.

“You okay?” Scylla says, out loud this time. Even with her mouth right next to Raelle’s ear, she has to shout to be heard.

Raelle shoves away her trepidation and nods, gently bumping their heads together. “Are you?” she shouts back. Necros may rarely go into combat, but that doesn’t mean Scylla doesn’t have her own job to do. Perhaps hers is even harder, in a way: at least Raelle gets to do hers with her sisters.

Instead of answering, Scylla reaches around and carefully plucks the salva tab out of Raelle’s upturned palm. She catches and holds Raelle’s gaze for a second, then gently takes the tab and presses it against Raelle’s neck.

This, too, is part of their ritual. Over the past month—of endless flights and too little sleep, moving over strange landscapes with a permanent sheen of dirt and disappointment on their skin—they’ve had to come up with new ways to touch. New ways to say _I love you_ and _I’ve got you_ and _I’m here_ , without ever actually saying the words.

Scylla tugs Raelle’s head back towards hers and kisses her hard, at the exact moment the salva hits her bloodstream. It’s a two-punch of sensation, dizzy and intoxicating; it makes her feel like she’s already floating. It would, Raelle thinks around her daze, piss Anacostia off _so much_ if she could see.

“Good luck,” Scylla says, mouth back at her ear. “You’ll be fine.”

“You will, too. Scyl—”

But then the sky seizes hold of her, and she’s falling, tumbling into the blue with her fists clenched and her mouth kiss-bruised. Her veins are lit up with a lightning she can’t be sure is only the mycelium, and it occurs to her, as she sinks through the still-cloudless sky, a hurricane wrapped in human skin, that perhaps this was what the premonition meant all along. Perhaps the approaching storm has always been _her_.

~*~

Their call sign is _Moirae_.

(“Like the Greek myth,” Tally had explained, when the name first showed up on the backs of their medals. “Moirae. The three Fates.”

“But there are _four_ of us,” Raelle had pointed out.

“It’s pronounced _Mwa-ray_ ,” Scylla had added.

Abigail had just snorted at all of them. “The _Fates_ ,” she’d repeated. “So no pressure, then, huh?”)

Now, as they hit the earth one by one, a trio of human darts, Raelle can’t help but think once again that Abigail saw it most clearly. If they didn’t know it before, they certainly know now that _Moirae_ refers not to three Fates (or, in their case, four), but one: that of all witchkind. Moirae is what they are tasked with protecting, and Moirae what they stand to lose if they fail. Whenever Raelle turns over her medal and sees it all spelled out— _Raelle Collar, Pvt. 1_ _st_ _Class, Strike Team Moirae_ —she knows that what she’s reading is both warning and reminder: _our fate is in your hands._

Moirae is what they carry with them, thrown around their shoulders and tucked beneath their arms, into every single combat drop. Every black-ops mission in the middle of the night to a suspected Camarilla stronghold, it grows a little heavier; every person of interest they follow only to inevitably lose adds more weight. This is why they’re all so tired, and why, Raelle suspects, things among them have become so strained.

It’s hard for her, watching that heaviness crush the people she loves most into new, unrecognizable shapes of themselves.

Harder still to know that, so far, it hasn’t amounted to anything.

But here they are again, with another chance to try. Raelle squints into the late-afternoon sunlight and tries to muster up some enthusiasm as she takes stock of their surroundings. They’re in a clearing bordered on three sides by woods, with fallow pastureland stretching away from them to the south. The trees are burning with autumn red and gold, and the air is thick with a graveyard kind of silence—still and eerie and not completely vacant. Although Raelle guesses the eeriness has more to do with the reason they’re here: the abandoned church at the edge of the woods.

It’s been at least fifty years since this church was abandoned, and nature has begun to reclaim it. But even half-strangled by the creeping foliage from the woods at its back, it cuts a proud and unsettling figure: lording over this little kingdom of nothing, with its steeple like the point of a knife scraping the sky. In the time since it last saw a congregation, the rest of civilization has simply slipped away from it—the nearest civilian town is eight klicks to the south—but it only sags a little into its foundations, as if it hasn’t heard the news. Even given the complicated history between witches and the Church, Raelle’s almost sorry that they’ll have to destroy it. There’s something admirable in the way it doggedly continues to stand, in spite of everything.

But Anacostia was adamant that it be leveled. For one thing, if it _has_ been used by the Camarilla as a rendezvous point, it’s important they not be able to use it again—not when it’s so close to Fort Salem. And for another, eight klicks is what Anacostia considers safe distance from a civilian population.

It’s not all that often they can safely practice a witchbomb out in the field.

Raelle shoves this thought aside and turns to Abigail and Tally. Tally’s got her scry out, absorbed in whatever she can see in its cloudy surface; after just a minute she looks up and nods at them. “Clear.”

Which is good enough for Raelle; she knows the scry makes sense to Tally in a way it probably never will to her. But Abigail is running point, and _running point_ , to Abigail, means putting on the full commanding-officer act. Even when the full commanding-officer act is wildly, _ridiculously_ unpopular with everyone else.

“You sure?” she asks, and the effect of those two little words is instant: Tally’s expression twists, and the hum of the mycelium in Raelle’s veins (which, she notices, has been miraculously quiet for the past few minutes) awakens and crackles, as if even _it_ is disappointed in Abigail.

“Can you let me do my _job?”_ Tally snaps, throwing Abigail’s words right back at her. Which, Raelle has to admit, sort of seems fair, considering. Tally doesn’t wait for a response, though; she jogs off toward the church without another word, leaving Raelle and Abigail momentarily stunned in her wake.

“Jesus, Abi,” Raelle mutters as they hasten after her. “Do you have to keep provoking her?”

“You heard what Anacostia said.” Abigail’s laser-focused on the church, and Raelle resigns herself to the fact that anything she says to her is probably going to fall on deaf ears. “We’re on a _mission_. She’s supposed to be leaving that unnecessary shit behind.”

And maybe that’s true, Raelle thinks, but what do she and Abigail know of _unnecessary?_ They’ve all been through their own version of hell in the past few months, but Tally’s the only one who’s been through it entirely alone. She may have had them all fooled for a minute—some of the old, bubbly Tally came back at the same time her youth did—but even then, you could see it in her eyes, if you bothered to look. Something important is missing, and sometimes, even when all three of them are in the same room together, Raelle has a funny feeling that that _something_ is her and Abigail.

They follow Tally up to the steps of the church, stepping gingerly around rotted sections of wood. Up close, it looks even shabbier: there are wide swaths of paint peeling away from its otherwise stately Ionic columns, and the door is hanging partly off its hinges. When Abigail nudges it open, it groans and falls the rest of the way off, hitting the ground with a deafening _thump_ , and they’re hit with an odor of graveyard dust: rot and disuse and decay so strong, it’s impossible to imagine people _ever_ being here. Let alone using it for secret meetings just this past week.

Tally turns her gaze on Raelle. “ _This_ is where Scylla said they were?” she hisses.

Raelle has to wrestle down her own doubts, as well as her instinct to protect Scylla, before she can answer. Because on the one hand, Tally’s been getting progressively weirder about the whole Scylla thing, and Raelle’s getting progressively more _over it_ ; but on the other hand, she promised herself she wouldn’t snap at Tally today. Not when Tally’s in such a fragile mood already, and Abigail can’t seem to _stop_ snapping at her.

It makes her wonder how _she_ , of all people, became the glue that’s holding them all together.

“We know they’ve got a thing about hallowed ground,” she offers, and shoulders her way through the threshold before either of them can argue. Inside, the smell is even more suffocating, and it’s darker than she expected. There are, Raelle notes with unease, no windows—not even the creepy stained-glass churches like this tend to favor. It makes the place feel more like a tomb than a place of worship.

Abigail coughs at the dust. “Can this even still be considered hallowed ground?”

“Yeah,” Tally surprises Raelle by interjecting. “Even if there hasn’t been any…hallowing, for a while.” A bitter edge creeps into her voice. “That kind of thing doesn’t go away.”

Abigail makes a noncommittal noise in her throat but otherwise leaves it alone. Raelle, meanwhile, gives her eyes a minute to adjust before going any further into the church. Her body is still humming to a frantic tempo—it feels like the mycelium is shooting lightning all the way through the marrow of her bones—but she still doesn’t know _why_. Only that something’s coming, and that Tally’s reassurance that the building is clear of Camarilla has done little to assuage her fears. Because if it’s not the Camarilla (who, at this point, after chasing so many dead ends, Raelle thinks she might almost be happy to see), then that can only mean there’s something _else_ out there.

It doesn’t bear thinking about—especially not in the depths of this shadow-strangled ruin, after they’ve announced themselves so nicely with the crash of the door. Raelle’s footsteps sound loud on the old, rotting floorboards, and she can clearly hear Abigail’s and Tally’s, too, as they fan out to her left and right. If anything _is_ lurking in here with the three of them, it’s biding its time in the dark.

“What exactly is it we’re supposed to be looking for?” Tally calls. Her voice rings loud through the empty rafters, and close. The church is smaller on the inside than Raelle expected, and much more bare: the altar and even a couple rows of pews have been removed, leaving rusted indents on the floor, and there are empty hooks hung at intervals along the walls. The only thing that appears to have been left alone is a small wooden crucifix, which hangs at a drunken angle above the place where the altar once stood.

“Anything they might have left behind.” Abigail taps her boot against one of the pews, as if there’s a chance it might be hollow. All that emerges is a solid _bang_ and a puff of dust. “Anything _useful_ ,” she amends, shooting Raelle a doubtful look. “Anything that might point us toward where they’re going next, or what they’re planning to do there.”

Tally laughs harshly at that. “Something useful in _here?”_

“Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not here.” Abigail’s tone is sharp, but Raelle can hear the thread of uncertainty running through it. “Whatever else they are, they’re not sloppy.”

“I don’t think they’re _sloppy_ ,” Tally retorts. “I think they were never here to begin with.”

She looks right at Raelle as she says it. There’s no heat behind her accusation, no anger, but there’s a challenge in her eyes that feels deliberate. Like she _wants_ Raelle to get angry with her. Raelle can’t fathom what the endgame _there_ might be—if this is yet another instance of Tally trying to punish herself for crimes she won’t specify—but she’s annoyed enough that she almost obliges. At the last second she remembers the don’t-snap-at-Tally thing and instead bites her tongue, and forces her tone to be soft:

“Tal,” she sighs, “can we not blame everything on me just because you hate Scylla? Because that’s not my—”

“I don’t _hate Scylla_ ,” Tally interrupts. “I’m just a little _tired_ of having to follow her bad intel everywhere.”

Raelle hears Abigail suck in a breath like she’s been punched. Because here it is, out in the open at last: the accusation that Raelle’s known was coming for a long time now. The accusation she’s already read on her sisters’ faces a thousand times, and heard a thousand of in their careful silences, and quieted in her own head too many times, as well. They’ve gotten so good at pretending to ignore it, it almost feels indecent, now, to lay everything out. Even Tally doesn’t seem to know where to look.

But Tally’s not exactly _wrong_ , and that’s almost the thing that’s most painful. Almost. Because while Raelle and her sisters have been collecting dead ends—marked off with black thumbtacks on a map in Anacostia’s office—Scylla’s been slowly crumbling beneath the effort it took to obtain them in the first place. And Raelle can do nothing but watch, helpless and sick with love for her, as every time her intel turns up nothing.

She knows why Tally’s putting this on her now. Knows that she, and Abigail too, think her love for Scylla is a blind spot. And maybe that was true once, but now, Raelle knows better. If anything, loving Scylla makes her see everything all too clearly.

She can’t seem to fit any of this into words, though. All the painful love and grief and despair and _exhaustion_ have settled as a hot lump in her throat; when she tries to speak around it, nothing comes out. Her palms feel strangely hot, too, and when she glances down at her gloved hands, dread washes slickly through her whole body.

There are sparks forming at her fingertips.

“Guys,” Abigail says slowly.

Instinctively, Raelle moves to hide her hands, but Abigail isn’t looking at her. She’s staring at the empty doorframe, and when Raelle follows her gaze, she understands why at once.

Because the world outside is suddenly washed in dark, charcoal gray, where just minutes ago there was clear blue sky. Raelle can see fat drops of rain hitting the steps of the porch, and the trees bending frantically in a wind that, until recently, didn’t exist.

“Guys,” Abigail says again. “That’s not natural weather.” There’s a note of panic slipping into her voice. “It’s not supposed to storm.”

The end of her sentence is cut off by a loud clap of thunder—so loud, it rattles the church’s foundations. When it ends, Raelle slowly pulls her hands out from behind her back.

Her fingertips are glowing orange, like coals at the base of a fire. Tally and Abigail stare.

“Actually,” Raelle says, “I think it is.”

~*~

They don’t waste time with words, after that.

Abigail’s the first to tear her eyes away from Raelle’s glowing hands; when Tally and Raelle follow suit, she meets their gazes and gives them a tight nod. It’s not a specific directive—in a way, the gesture feels like it’s being given sister to sister, rather than soldier to soldier—but maybe that’s what they needed to flip the switch all along. Because just like that, they’re _back:_ falling in line with one another so easily, Raelle can’t imagine how they fell out of sync in the first place. For a perfect, suspended moment, she feels some of the weight of the previous month slough off her shoulders; she feels like the kind of strong Abigail has been insisting they were all along.

She feels like they can finally call themselves a _unit_ again, and in every sense of the word.

But the momentary triumph doesn’t last, and when reality crashes back in, it makes Raelle shudder. Because they’ve had their share of scrapes over the past month, but nothing bad enough to bring them all back together like this. Which means, she thinks dully, that this must be _it_. The moment they’ve been waiting for.

She’s proven correct as soon as they step out of the church. The outside world is blanketed in a storm-saturated darkness, lit up at intervals by jagged bars of lightning; it’s raining steadily, and the wind through the trees behind them sounds like the scream of a living thing. It’s a fury, but one that could almost feel safe and familiar—at least, Raelle thinks, compared to the thing at the edge of the forest. The thing which the storm appears to just barely be keeping at bay.

Because standing at the edge of the forest are five men in red jackets—five men standing in a spearhead formation, their faces obscured with dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats. None of them moves a muscle, even when Raelle and her sisters come spilling out of the church’s doorway, but nonetheless, Raelle knows what they’re there for. If there was any doubt at all, the things the men wear looped around their necks put it to rest.

The Camarilla have finally come for them.

The men continue to just stand there, completely still. If not for the rain—which already has the whole unit soaked to the skin; Raelle can hear Tally’s teeth chattering—they’d look almost casual. Like a group of tourists come to see the old, ruined church, with Raelle, Abigail, and Tally serving as a mild interruption in their sightseeing. It’s disconcerting, and Raelle, her heart suddenly in her throat, is reminded of the way the Camarilla encircled their strike team in the Altai Mountains. How they stood there in just the same way, perfectly still and calm, while bastardized seed sounds spilled out of their throats and Alder’s pilots burned.

Which then puts her in mind of their own pilot, and Anacostia, and _Scylla_. A bolt of lightning splits the sky in two, and the clap of thunder that follows is so loud it shakes the ground.

Without taking her eyes off the Camarilla, Abigail reaches behind her and lightly touches Raelle’s sleeve. “Relax,” she murmurs, and inclines her head ever so slightly to the left. Raelle follows her line of vision and sees their bat disappear behind one of the storm-dark clouds.

Still airborne, then. Still _safe_. The vise around Raelle’s heart loosens just the smallest bit, and with it, the ground stops shaking.

“Okay.” Abigail’s back in commanding-officer mode, only now, it’s almost comforting. “I’m guessing all this is you, shitbird?”

“Seems that way,” Raelle agrees. Even though it makes absolutely no logical sense—how could a storm she didn’t sing up have anything to do with her?—the evidence, in the air and in her hands and all the way through to the threads of mycelium invisible within her, is fairly damning.

Abigail hums. “Any chance you could, you know, make it stop?”

“Seeing it as I didn’t make it _start_ , I’m thinking no.”

“If the bat can’t get close enough—”

“We can’t do the tertiary protocol. _I know_.” Though Raelle sneaks another look at the sky as she says it. _Please_ , she thinks, in the general direction of a Goddess she’s pretty sure she doesn’t believe in. _Don’t make her have to do the tertiary protocol._

“Guys,” Tally interrupts. “ _Look_.”

Raelle and Abigail instantly turn their gazes back toward the Camarilla. They still haven’t moved from the spot where they’re standing, but now, they’re tipping their heads back toward the sky, mouths gaping open like they mean to try and swallow the storm whole. It’s _singing_ —one of their horrible mock-ups of witches’ songs—and while the storm makes it impossible to hear _what_ they’re singing, the fact that they’re singing at all means the time for discussion is past.

“Right.” Abigail unhooks the scourge from her belt and squints across the distance. “Screw the tertiary protocol, then. We keep it close. Use the storm to our advantage. Tally, you’re on my six. Rae—”

She pauses, then turns so Raelle can see the sly grin playing at the corner of her mouth. Unbelievable. And also, in a weird way, exactly what Raelle needs right now: a reminder that however much some things may change, certain others—when it comes to Abigail, anyway—never do.

“Go fucking crazy,” Abigail says, and with a sharp crack of her scourge, she charges headlong into the tempest. Tally follows after only a second’s hesitation, glancing at Raelle before she goes. There’s a question in her eyes, a wordless _you okay?_ that, while it’s fleeting, is so reminiscent of the old, familiar Tally that Raelle nods fiercely in reply, even though it’s not strictly true.

And then Tally’s off, leaving Raelle to bring up the rear, all the while wondering how, exactly, she’s supposed to _go fucking crazy_ with a storm she didn’t consciously create.

She doesn’t have long to wonder, though; they breach the distance in what feels like a few furious strides, and then the Camarilla are _there_ , close enough that they can make out their singing. It’s a strange, guttural melody that, when first heard, sounds nothing at all like the song for windstrikes; but it knocks Raelle right off her feet just the same, sending all the breath whooshing painfully out of her lungs when she hits the ground. The force of the impact stuns her, leaving her flat on her back with the world spinning nauseously around her; the blow was weaker than a real windstrike could have produced, true, but it still should have been enough to trigger the mycelium’s self-defense. Perhaps it didn’t recognize the unfamiliar song. Or perhaps it’s been so long since Raelle’s seen combat like this, she’s forgotten that _some_ involvement from her is still required.

She hears Tally cry out in pain, then, but can’t locate where the sound is coming from. By the time she struggles back to her feet, Tally’s nowhere to be seen, and Abigail is rushing forward into the rain, her scourge a deadly blur above her head.

Raelle pulls herself clumsily to her feet and tries to make the scene settle in her head. Visibility’s poor, but she can see one of the Camarilla already on the ground, about twenty feet from where she’s standing. His throat’s been bisected by Abigail’s scourge, and his voice box lies broken in the mud, sparking and sputtering uselessly. Two others are running full tilt towards the open field to their left, and she hears a howl of pain somewhere to the right that might be a third; but then her thoughts are cut off by a knife flying at her out of nowhere. It’s not one of the ostentatious Camarilla scythes she’s seen before (been _speared on_ , before), but an ordinary hunting knife, intended for throwing. It slips through the air with terrifying speed and precision, but barely a second after Raelle spots it, the mycelium bats it away: actually _reversing_ its course mid-flight, so that it goes arcing back in the direction it came from.

Which, of course, is when Raelle looks up and sees a windstrike knock Tally backwards, right into the path of the rebounding knife.

“Tal—!”

She lunges for Tally and grabs her, instinct overriding the sluggish part of her brain that’s overwhelmed by just how much is _happening_. She manages to yank Tally out of harm’s way just in time, pulling her close against her chest and letting them both topple back into the mud; a second later, there’s a wet _thunk_ somewhere to the left of them, and a man’s voice roars in pain.

And Raelle just holds Tally for a minute—presses her face against her back, into the warmth of her body, and lets herself be afraid. “Tal,” she repeats, even though she can see another Camarilla approaching the two of them. “You okay? Tally?” She’s panting a little, out of breath and dizzy and in pain, but she can feel Tally trembling against her, and that’s worse. Tally isn’t someone who _trembles_ in battle; Raelle knows that from the fight in the Altai Mountains. If Tally’s this shaken by a stray knife and a bastardized windstrike…

But Tally never gives her an answer, because the Camarilla approaching them just then breaks into a run. Raelle can see he has a knife in his fist—the same knife, by the looks of it, that the mycelium just sent right into the meat of his leg. He’s hobbling, but his teeth are bared, and although Raelle can’t see his eyes, she can imagine the rage behind them. And Tally’s still shaking against her, and Raelle _does_ technically have orders to _go fucking crazy_ , so she lets her emotions take over and make the decision for her: she pushes Tally out of the way and calls up a windstrike, weaving an extra seed sound into the tail end of the song.

The Camarilla’s body splits in half in midair, before hitting the muddy ground with an obscene _splat_.

Raelle thinks she hears Tally moan the sight, but before she can turn around to make sure she’s all right, they both hear Abigail scream, “ _Tally, my six!”_ , and then Tally’s scrambling away, her boots slipping in the mud and blood beneath her feet. And suddenly, Raelle is _alone:_ the wet, muddy epicenter of a storm that’s swiftly growing in size and wrath, her face spattered with Camarilla blood and her hands still giving off a flame-orange glow. She can’t hear her sisters or the Camarilla’s songs, anymore, but there’s a faint whining in her ears, and when she looks up, she can see it again: the bat, flying lower now than it was before, the sound of its rotors from a distance reduced to a mosquito hum.

She relaxes for only a second before something catches her eyes in the trees. A slight bending of branches, counter to the direction of the wind—a flicker of movement so slight that, on any other day, she might have called it her eyes playing tricks.

But one of their best guesses about the Camarilla—like everything else, till now, unproven—is that because their voice-box songs are weaker, they have to fight in greater numbers. Five on three was suspiciously even odds from the start, and with the bat flying so close, the Camarilla will know that there are more witches in the vicinity. There are almost definitely more of them, lurking in the trees. There could be any number, and Raelle’s heart sinks with the realization.

If they’re as badly outnumbered as she fears, there’s only one way they can win.

Raelle glances down at her hands, then back up at the storm. It’s not the witchbomb she fears this time—no more than usual, anyway—but these strange new elements, which are one and the same in a way she doesn’t understand. But what she _does_ understand is that this power is shifting and changing within her, swelling to terrifying proportions that are utterly out of her control.

The Camarilla won’t survive if Raelle explodes, but Raelle’s worried _she_ won’t, either.

The sound of rapid footfalls approaching from behind forces her back to attention. She loosens her scourge from its place at her hip and has it already wrapped in her fist by the time a figure in tactical gear bursts through the driving rain.

When she sees that it’s _Scylla_ —her face a pale half-moon under the hood of her gear, wet hair hanging in ropes around her face and blue eyes blazing—she’s startled to the point of numbness. For a good thirty seconds, she just stares at her, stunned, before remembering to let the scourge relax in her fist.

“Just me,” Scylla shouts over the wind. She reaches over and cups Raelle’s face lightly before kneeling down in the mud, resting her hands over the gored halves of the Camarilla’s body. Raelle can’t seem to move to react—can’t seem to do anything but _look_ at her—and after a second, Scylla glances back up briefly, as if she can feel the weight of her stare. “Can you watch my back while I do this?” she asks.

Raelle manages to find her voice: “Scyl—” she says, then shakes her head, as if that might be enough to clear it. Drops of rain go flying from the ends of her braids, and when she opens her mouth again, nothing comes out. Because Scylla’s so _calm_ , almost nonchalant about being in the middle of a battlefield with a mutilated body, and Raelle’s still trying to wrap her head around her being here in the first place. Scylla not supposed to do combat drops. Barring an emergency, Scylla’s not supposed to do _combat_ , period. She’s supposed to stay safe in the bat with Anacostia, singing to the death-current and directing it from a distance if she can. And, okay, _probably_ this counts as an emergency, but still: the thought of Scylla safe, and relatively out of harm’s way, is something Raelle’s always been able to hold on to, to keep her steady.

Now Scylla’s here, in the middle of all the mud and blood and storm and chaos, and all Raelle can think is how much more, suddenly, there is to lose if they fail.

Scylla seems to sense all of this, too, because when she looks up at Raelle again, her expression is soft. With one hand still in the middle of the dead man’s back, she reaches with her other for Raelle’s; her palm is cold and clammy from the rain, but Raelle laces their fingers together tightly.

“Tertiary protocol,” Scylla says, still shouting to be heard. “Anacostia said it was time.” She squeezes Raelle’s hand hard, forcing Raelle to look her in the eyes. “ _Can you watch my back?”_

Raelle thinks that when ( _if)_ they get out of this, they’re going to need to have a serious talk about Scylla using those eyes as leverage. At the moment, though, it doesn’t matter. There’s only one possible answer to that question, and they both know it.

“Yeah,” Raelle says. Gently, and against every instinct in her body, she lets Scylla’s hand slip out of her own, freeing her up to do what she needs to. “Always. I’ve got you, Scyl.”

~*~

This is how the tertiary protocol works:

First, it requires something freshly dead. The more recently it happened, the better. The energy of death is like the energy of the living in more ways than most people think, but this is the major difference: once something’s dead, that energy doesn’t always linger indefinitely. According to Scylla, nobody knows why this happens, or where that energy goes. All they can be certain of is that, for Work as powerful as this, it’s best to strike while the iron is cooling.

Second, in order for the Work to be powerful, the death itself must be, as well. This is something Scylla never elaborates on very much; Raelle suspects that, in order to learn the death-channel song, Sergeant L’Amara put Scylla through some ghoulish test runs. But the gist of it is simply that the death of something small, like a mouse or an insect, cannot create a death-channel strong enough to harm a human being. Nothing short of an equivalent exchange will do.

And third: by nature, the tertiary protocol requires Scylla to perform it. It’s why there are two protocols in place before it, and also probably why Anacostia is now insisting on skipping over them both. Necros don’t belong in the field except as a last resort, and the death-channel is an incredibly dark piece of Work; but on the other hand, it could save their lives one day, and in order for it to do that, Scylla needs to practice on the ground.

It’s chilling, unpleasant Work—the kind of thing that makes Raelle understand why Necros are kept apart from the general population. And yet. She can’t deny, as she watches Scylla draw the dead man’s energy up through her palms, her seed sounds threading together into a spine-chilling melody, that there’s something bewitching about the Work, too. Or maybe it’s just in the way Scylla performs it. She’s kneeling in front of a gory mess of a body with her hands caked in its blood, but her eyes are almost salva-bright, and there’s a lethally beautiful smile creeping up the corners of her mouth. Raelle can’t tear her eyes away.

Scylla _loves_ this shit, even though it’s the type of thing that would make most people squirm. The academic in her can’t resist a difficult piece of Work, especially if it’s one as carefully restricted as the death-current. She’s enjoying herself so much, Raelle thinks she wouldn’t be surprised if Anacostia never actually ordered the tertiary protocol at all. It would be just like Scylla to see an opportunity and take things into her own hands.

This girl, she thinks. This girl who’s twice saved her life is going to be the absolute death of her. 

As she watches, Scylla breathes in deep, like she’s drawing the death energy into her lungs. She holds her breath for a count of three, then slowly breathes back out a new song: one that crescendos into something quick and dangerous, like a heartbeat stuttering out of rhythm. Her hands are raised to the level of her shoulders, slick and bloody; when she lowers them, it’s like a conductor at the end of a symphony, discharging her music into the world.

Not even a minute passes before they hear the sound of the first body falling.

This is what the death-channel is: an invisible bullet made out of pure energy, which, rather than piercing its targets, steals the life from their bodies and feeds off it. Scylla sings to direct it, but the more people it kills, the stronger and more unpredictable it becomes. She needs to have complete focus over the song, which is why Raelle remains standing at her side, watching over her but not touching her, or making any movements that might distract her. She’s so focused on Scylla, in fact, that she barely notices the storm beginning to dissipate around them; when she realizes she can’t feel rain hitting her face anymore, she looks around her, startled. A cool, eerie mist has settled over the clearing in place of the rain, and while the sky is still mottled like a bruise with dark clouds, the wind has stopped howling.

In its absence, they can hear that much more clearly the sound of more bodies dropping: a series of dull thuds in the distance, so quick and so quiet. The death-channel works fast. Not one of them even has time to scream.

Abigail and Tally appear through the mist, then, Abigail jogging and Tally limping behind. Raelle waves both hands at them to make them slow down, but they must have already guessed what was happening, because they both come to a halt as soon as they notice her. Still with a careful eye on Scylla, Raelle goes over to join them, making her steps as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.

“You guys okay?” she asks quietly. They don’t look too badly off—Abigail’s hands are sliced to ribbons, and in addition to the limp, Tally’s left eye is bruised and swollen, but those are things Raelle can easily fix. She’s thinking more of the way Tally shook in her arms before. About how something is still _off_ with her. She tries to catch her eye, but Tally’s lost in a world of her own, staring at something in the distance over Raelle’s left shoulder.

Raelle tries to bury her disappointment. For a little while there, it seemed like their Tally might be back for good.

“We’re fine,” Abigail says shortly. She nods in Scylla’s direction. “I thought we weren’t doing the tertiary protocol.”

“Yeah.” Raelle shoves her hands in her pockets. “Guess Anacostia had other ideas.”

Abigail snorts, then winces, laying her hand at her side. “Broken rib,” she says, off of Raelle’s questioning look. “I mean, I’m pretty sure it’s my rib. And pretty sure it’s broken.”

Raelle laughs weakly. “Always making messes for me to clean up,” she says, because being able to banter right now is a _relief_. Bantering means it’s almost over. Bantering means the bat will be coming for them any minute now, means they’ll be going back to Fort Salem. Means that in a few hours, Raelle will finally get to _sleep_ , in a real bed, behind a closed door, where she can hold Scylla as close as she wants.

From the way Abigail laughs readily, Raelle guesses she’s not the only one who’s ready to wrap this all up and go home. “Oh, _you_ wanna talk about other people’s messes?” she banters back. “That’s rich considering—”

But just then, Scylla stops singing, and Raelle’s attention pivots back toward her just in time to see her pitch forward on hands and knees in the mud, a horrible, strangled choking sound coming out of her throat in place of the song.

Raelle’s higher reasoning shorts out right about then; she throws herself down in the mud at Scylla’s side and places a hand on her lower back to steady her. “Scylla,” she says, hating the note of panic in her voice but unable to suppress it. She’s seen Scylla do a lot of complicated, draining Work before today, but none of it ever made her _choke_. “Scylla, hey.” With her free hand, she reaches around to cradle Scylla’s face, gently urging her to turn and face her.

“Hey,” she repeats, slightly embarrassed by Abigail and Tally watching, but more concerned with the painful sound Scylla’s making as she tries to draw breath. “ _Hey_ , it’s okay. You did it. It’s over.” She has no idea if that’s actually true or not, but there’s a wild look in Scylla’s eyes that she doesn’t like. Raelle knows she’d say pretty much anything, if she thought it would make that look go away.

“It’s okay,” she repeats, smoothing wet ropes of hair away from Scylla’s face. Scylla leans instinctively into her touch, but then makes another strangled noise and shakes her head against Raelle’s hand, pushing herself away.

“Something’s wrong,” she rasps. Her voice is thin and hoarse; whatever’s just happened has scraped her throat raw. “The song—I don’t know what happened—something’s _wrong.”_

“What?” Abigail demands. “ _What’s_ wrong? What’s she talking about?”

Scylla shakes her head despondently; Raelle whips around to glare at Abigail. “Abi,” she says warningly.

“Well, if something’s gone wrong, she needs to _tell_ us. We don’t understand this Necro shit—”

“ _Abi_ ,” Raelle repeats, but all the venom in her tone dries up as a new sound enters the clearing. It’s a kind of collective groan—faint, but coming from multiple directions at once—followed by the sound of limbs scrabbling for purchase in the mud.

“ _No,”_ Raelle hears Tally breathe out.

Raelle doesn’t know what she’s thinking—doesn’t understand this Necro Work any more than Tally or Abigail—but she can take a pretty good guess. Because what they’re hearing sounds an awful lot like bodies, picking themselves back up from the mud where they fell. Bodies who had the life plucked out of them by Scylla’s song. Bodies to whom that life would have returned, violently and abruptly, if something went wrong with the song before it was finished.

Bodies who are now, once again, living, breathing Camarilla.

Raelle looks at Scylla for confirmation. Scylla just squeezes her eyes shut, hugging her arms against herself and shaking her head.

“Okay,” Raelle says, because what else _can_ she say? What she wants, more than anything else in the world right now—even more than a real bed—is to pull Scylla’s wet, muddy, bloodstained body into her arms and keep her there. But they don’t have time for that, or for anything else now, it seems, so she settles for wrapping an arm around Scylla’s waist and helping her to stand. “Okay,” she says again, as she gently steadies Scylla on her feet. “We need to do a witchbomb. Right now.”

Abigail nods at once. “I’ll assist,” she says. “Tally, make sure Necro here doesn’t keel over or something.”

“I want to do it.”

The quiet conviction in Tally’s voice brings Raelle up short. In spite of the urgency of the situation—in spite of the figures she can just barely make out through the mist—she pauses to look her sister in the eye. The distracted, faraway gaze she saw there before is gone, and in its place, something much harder has settled.

“You never let me assist,” Tally says. “Just—please let me do it this time. _Please_.”

And Raelle hesitates, just for a second. Because there’s a very good reason they never let Tally assist—a reason she knows is on all of their minds, a reason she can practically _feel_ in the way Abigail’s boring into her with her eyes. She knows Abigail won’t actually say anything—this is another one of those things they carefully tiptoe around—but the fact of the matter is this: in the month since Strike Team Moirae started operating, they’ve tested the witchbomb three times. Once with Abigail assisting. Twice with Scylla.

Tally’s never managed it.

And Raelle _knows_ that the smart thing to do here would be to break Tally’s heart, but she can’t bring herself to do it. It’s completely illogical, and Abigail will give her _hell_ for it later (if she bothers to wait that long, that is), but today is the most in sync they’ve been all month, the most they’ve managed to function as a _unit_ since before the Altai Mountains.

Raelle’s not going to be the one to destroy that.

“All right, Tal, fine,” she says, and grabs hold of her hand, squeezing her eyes closed in concentration. She hears Abigail huff with impatience, but ignores her, focusing hard on letting the mycelium wake up inside her. On letting it settle its heat back into the palms of her hands, and on feeling the warmth of Tally’s hand in hers, and nudging the mycelium toward it.

 _You can trust her_ , she thinks, feeling slightly absurd as she does so. _We can trust her_. She doesn’t even know if the mycelium’s sentience extends to being able to hear thoughts, but figures it can’t hurt. Not when everything else she and Tally have tried so far has failed so miserably.

And for a second, she does feel the familiar prickle start up through her fingers—more faintly than she’s used to, but unmistakably _there_. When she opens her eyes to check that it’s actually working, though, there’s nothing. Just their two linked hands—Tally’s bare, hers gloved—and Tally’s dark eyes looking back at her with helpless frustration.

“ _Guys_ ,” Abigail shouts, panicked. When Raelle tears her eyes away from Tally, she can see that the figures coming through the mist are clearer than ever; and that while some of them are staggering a little from their injuries, they all are falling into an orderly line. Soon, Raelle thinks, numb with horror, the singing will start again. “Now would be a good time to— _guys!”_

Instinctively, Raelle lets her hand fall away from Tally’s. She’s not thinking of her next move at all—if she should reach for Abigail or Scylla, or for her scourge—but, as it turns out, she doesn’t need to. Because as soon as their hands separate, it’s like a pin’s been pulled from a grenade: a beat of perfect silence, and then, a _bang._

Raelle watches, helpless, as tendrils of pure white energy explode from her palms, lighting up the clearing like a flash bomb. And it’s never an easy thing, this sudden transformation into something that _destroys_ —not something that’s gotten easier with time or practice—but this time in particular, something feels different. This time, the witchbomb _roars_ with an intensity she’s never felt before, the force of it flinging her up into the air and holding her, suspended like a rag doll. This time, she’s afraid the force that leaves her body will tear her in half before it’s run its course.

All she can see is pure white light, so strong that it ought to blind her. But it _is_ her, and so she closes her eyes, and just _feels_ the energy her body is conducting. Feels its impact on the earth, and the way it blows through all the Camarilla bodies. How they crumple, all at once, from the force of it.

Raelle’s last coherent thought before everything goes dark is that she’s not even sure Scylla knows this about her: how much she feels it, every single time the witchbomb kills.

~*~

When it’s over, she blinks her eyes open and finds she’s back on the ground: slightly dazed and slumped in the mud with her entire body aching, and Tally and Abigail each holding on to one of her arms.

Before Raelle’s brain has a chance to catch up to the rest of her—before she has to make sense of whatever just happened—she’s reaching for them, folding her fingers tightly over theirs. It’s the kind of stupid, emotional gesture she usually hates, but in her defense, she’s not at her best right now. Leftover energy is still buzzing through her body, and her brain feels fuzzy with a strange, dissociative high: like part of her is still hanging in midair, helpless to the whims of something so much stronger than she is. She needs to know that something else, equally strong, has got a hold on her, too.

Tally and Abigail have always been her anchors, even if Raelle rarely likes to admit it. But right now it’s impossible to deny: with the practiced ease of two people who are well accustomed to dragging her out of trouble, they haul her back to her feet. For a long moment, the three of them just stand there, side by side, their ragged, disjointed breathing slowly evening out to match one another’s. In the newfound stillness of the clearing, even this small sound seems incredibly loud.

Abigail’s the one to break the silence. “Was that all of them?” she asks. She’s clutching her injured rib again. It must have gotten jostled by the force of the explosion, Raelle thinks; she tries not to feel guilty about this, or to think too hard about what other things she might have accidentally made worse.

“Dunno,” she replies instead, and looks at Tally, who’s still, by the sounds of things, having a hard time catching her breath. “Can you see anything, Tal?”

Tally just shakes her head and doesn’t answer. Her face is bright red—not, Raelle thinks, from exertion—and she won’t look either of them in the eye.

“It’s okay,” Abigail pipes up, more gently than she’s spoken to Tally all day. “You did well.”

Tally shakes her head again, still staring hard into the mist. Maybe, Raelle thinks, it’s like the surface of her scry, cloudy and impenetrable unless you know how to see. Maybe there are secrets written in the fog that the rest of them simply aren’t privy to.

“No,” Tally says at last. “I really didn’t do anything at all.”

Abigail gives Raelle a curious look. Evidently, she didn’t see what happened right before the witchbomb: she thinks Tally finally managed to assist. The fact that she didn’t—the fact that Raelle seems to have generated it completely on her own—has implications that Raelle frankly doesn’t want to think about.

But even as she’s determinedly pushing all _that_ out of her head—Tally and the mycelium and the witchbomb, and the circle of Camarilla bodies she knows she’ll find just outside the clearing—she notices, with a horrible, icy shock, that something else is still very, very wrong.

She wheels around to Abigail. “Where’s Scylla?” she demands.

When Abigail’s only response is to look back at Raelle in confusion, Raelle feels the ice around her harden. Suddenly it’s hard to breathe again. “Abigail, _where’s Scylla?”_

“I don’t know!” Abigail turns desperately to Tally, who finally looks like she’s snapped out of it; but the expression on her face matches the one on Abigail’s, and it doesn’t make Raelle feel any better. “I wasn’t—”

“Dammit, you were _right next to her!”_ Raelle can hear the way her voice cracks like a whip through the stillness of the clearing. Can hear how hysterical she already is, but can’t bring herself to care. Her mind is firing off in a thousand different directions, but she can’t _think_ , won’t be _able_ to think until—

“I couldn’t see! The witchbomb—Raelle—”

“I’ve got it,” Tally interrupts, her voice surprisingly steady. “I’ve got it, okay? Just _calm down_.”

And she waves them clear of her, forcing them both to take a step back before closing her eyes. She doesn’t bother, this time, to get her scry out of her pocket. As she’s told Anacostia a million times: she doesn’t really need it.

Raelle’s never been more grateful for Tally—for just how good she is at what she does. Her heart still feels like it’s trying to beat out of her chest, but after barely a minute, Tally opens her eyes and says, “Behind the church—”

She might say more, after that, but Raelle doesn’t hear it. She’s off like a shot, running full tilt for the church, with Abigail right behind her—clutching her side in pain, but still hot on Raelle’s heels. And it’s a testament, surely, to how much both her sisters love her: how quickly and unthinkingly they throw themselves back into the fray for a girl they tolerate at best. But Raelle’s not in the fucking headspace to be grateful for that right now. She’s running as much to outpace her own thoughts as anything else (because they’re leaping, of _course_ , to the worst possible scenarios), but she’s doing a _really_ bad job of it, and she feels, increasingly, like she can’t breathe. It’s all so much at once, so many thoughts crowding out her brain, that it’s not until Abigail shouts for her attention that she notices a new sound in the silence of the clearing: one of the Camarilla’s bastardized songs, coming from right where Tally said Scylla would be.

“What _is_ that?” she hears Abigail mutter, more to herself than Raelle. Raelle, who, of course, doesn’t recognize the song, either, but also, at the moment, doesn’t fucking _care_. She pushes ahead of Abigail and rounds the corner of the church so fast, she nearly loses her footing on the wet, muddy slick that the ground has become.

And nearly startles the Camarilla crouching in the shadow of the church—the Camarilla who, she sees, is hovering over an unconscious Scylla. He looks right up at Raelle but doesn’t stop singing through the voice box around his neck.

And that’s when Raelle sees his gloved fingers pressed against Scylla’s forehead.

She doesn’t so much as pause, after that; in the time it takes the Camarilla to realize what’s happening, she’s already knocked him flat on his back with a windstrike. Still on autopilot, she unhitches the scourge from her side and with all the strength she can muster brings it down upon his neck.

She hears the sound of his skin splitting open—a grotesque _squelch_ , like an overripe fruit—but it barely registers at all. Nor does Abigail’s sharp intake of breath, when she rounds the corner and sees what Raelle’s done. None of it matters. Not when Scylla’s lying in the mud like something a child picked up and then flung aside. Not when there are five bloodless spots on her forehead, from where the Camarilla put his filthy fucking _hands_ on her.

Not when she still hasn’t moved.

Raelle’s on her knees beside her before the Camarilla’s horrible death-gargle has even gone silent. “Scyl,” she whispers. “Scylla, oh my God,” and pulls her against her body, the way she’d been so desperate to do before. Scylla doesn’t move or answer, but her skin is warm beneath Raelle’s hands, and when Raelle wraps a hand around her wrist, she can feel a pulse ticking away, steady and sure. And that’s good enough to make her relax, just a little. As long as her heart’s beating, whatever’s wrong is something Raelle can fix.

 _Unless._ The memory of the bastardized Work the Camarilla was performing over Scylla floats uneasily to the top of Raelle’s mind, but she shoves the thought away for now. She cradles Scylla tight against her, and faintly, in the distance, hears the sound of the bat, growing louder and louder as it comes.

“It’s over,” she whispers, lips close to Scylla’s ear. “You did so good. We’re going home now.” She knows Scylla can’t necessarily hear it, but it doesn’t matter; Raelle thinks she needs to hear those words out loud as much as Scylla does.

She senses Abigail standing too still and too close, and glances up at her again. But Abigail isn’t looking at her. She’s staring at the body of the dead Camarilla, with a strange look on her face. Before Raelle can ask her what that’s about, Tally comes hobbling around the side of the church; as soon as she sees whatever Abigail’s looking at, her expression immediately turns to horror.

“Goddess _protect_ ,” she gasps, at the same time Abigail blurts out, “What the _fuck?_ ”

And at first, Raelle thinks she just means in general. When she follows Abigail’s line of vision back to the dead Camarilla, though, she sees at once what she meant.

The dead man’s voice box, lying in the mud. The mechanical device designed to mimic seed sounds—what they _thought_ was a mechanical device.

The force of the blow from Raelle’s scourge has smashed the voice box open. Wordlessly, Abigail stoops to pick it up, holding it between forefinger and thumb like it might bite her. When she lifts it for Raelle to see, Raelle suddenly knows, without a doubt, that even if today can be counted as a triumph—which, in all honesty, it doesn’t really feel like it _can_ —everything else is about to get much, much worse.

Because hooked up to the mechanical bits and bobs inside the voice box—like a beating heart pumping life to all other parts of its body—is something bloody and organic.

The unmistakable double-V shape of a witch’s vocal cords.

~*~

“That,” Anacostia pronounces, “did _not_ go well.”

For once, no one argues with her. No one, in fact, says anything at all. The only sound in the room is the _snick-snick-snick_ of the clock hanging over Scylla’s hospital bed.

“None of you got anything to say to that?”

Silence. It’s a testament, Raelle thinks, to how much they’ve all been through: usually, they never hesitate to get into it with Anacostia, even when she’s chewing them out. But in the hour since they landed back at Fort Salem—since they were shut up here, in this tiny private suite in the infirmary, to wait for her—a heavy, pervasive silence has settled among them. Breaking it now means coming out of the soporific lull they’ve fallen into, where they don’t ever need to talk about what happened today.

The very idea of it feels insurmountable. And yet their silence is clearly agitating Anacostia, who’s already as agitated as they’ve ever seen her. It doesn’t bother her this much when they do mouth off. That, at least, she’s familiar with; that, she knows how to handle. She’s gotten so good at issuing demerits that she can do it mid-speech, without so much as a pause between words. She’s taken to referring to her strike team as _the most insubordinate group of trainees I’ve ever been saddled with, Goddess protect me._

She always says it with a note of fondness, is the thing.

She doesn’t look especially fond of them now. As she rests her gaze on each of them in turn—Raelle curled up beside Scylla on the bed, with Abigail perched at the foot of it and Tally slumped on the floor—Raelle thinks she looks like she could cheerfully throttle them one by one, and still walk out of the infirmary with a spring in her step. She’s not, Raelle knows, exactly _angry_ , for all that her nostrils are flaring and her eyes are flinty. Nor is she simply frustrated with them, either, though God knows that _is_ part of it.

Anacostia’s _afraid_ , and that is so much more terrifying than her anger could ever be.

Abigail’s the one who finally steps up to break the silence: “What did Alder have to say?” she asks quietly. She’s sitting at the very edge of the mattress, absently picking at the fraying corner of a blanket. Even though the head Fixer took care of her broken ribs an hour ago, she’s still moving stiffly, afflicted with the memory of pain. Bits of dirt and dried mud from under her fingernails have gotten all over the sheets, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She’s _subdued_ , Raelle thinks, and while it’s no different than what any of the rest of them are going through, it looks pronounced and strange on a Bellweather.

“As you might _imagine_ , she was not _impressed_.” Anacostia looks from Abigail down to the opposite end of the bed, where Raelle’s wedged in next to Scylla—so close that she can feel her tense under Anacostia’s scrutiny. “She says your performances gave her serious reason to doubt this team’s capability. And she requested that I remind you, Collar, in particular that reassignment is still very much on the table.”

By this point, it’s an old threat, but it’s one that makes Scylla’s breath audibly catch. Raelle doesn’t know what exactly she’s afraid of—Raelle being reassigned, or what might happen to _her_ if Alder dismantles Moirae—but she instinctively reaches for Scylla’s hand and laces their fingers together before answering.

“We took out a whole team of Camarilla today,” she reminds Anacostia. “We figured out how they’re making the voice boxes work.” The memory of that hideous contraption makes the bile rise in her throat, but she swallows it back down. “What more exactly does Alder _want?”_

Some of the ire goes out of Anacostia at that; her shoulders sag a little, loosening from their rigid, defensive stance. “Look,” she sighs, “I’m not saying some of what you did out there today wasn’t good. _Some_ ,” she repeats, glaring at them for emphasis. “But we gave you a cut and dry mission. Get in, do what you need to, get out. And now I’ve got a church that’s still standing, a soldier who’s potentially compromised, and three of my soldiers _bickering like children_ in the middle of an op.” Her gaze bores into Raelle. “So I’m gonna have to say there’s a _lot_ more we _both_ want from you.”

“The Camarilla—”

“Weren’t part of the plan, I know.” Anacostia waves her protests away. “But guess what? In real combat, sometimes _nothing_ goes according to plan. And you’re _still_ required to act like soldiers and _not make sloppy mistakes_.”

Before Raelle can open her mouth to argue that today’s combat felt pretty fucking real to her, Anacostia is already rounding on Abigail. “For instance,” she barks. “Bellweather. Why the hell was Craven given the go-ahead to perform an assist?”

Which is, maybe, the worst possible thing she could have brought up right now. Abigail, in a rare turn of events, is rendered speechless, opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish, whereupon Tally cuts in:

“Craven,” she says dully, “was just trying to clean up the mess _Scylla_ made.” Her tone is lifeless, but her eyes are not; when she turns her head to shoot Scylla an accusing look, Raelle can see that they’re dark with anger. And Raelle’s about five seconds from breaking the don’t-snap-at-Tally rule to pieces—letting loose the restless, toothsome thing that’s been pacing back and forth inside her since she saw the Camarilla put his hands on her girl—but then Tally sags bonelessly back against the wall.

“Sorry to have failed at _that_ , too,” she adds miserably.

Anacostia stares at her on the floor. “So Craven _didn’t_ perform the assist,” she confirms slowly.

When nobody answers, her mouth goes tight with annoyance. “Who the hell set off that witchbomb, then?”

And Raelle can sense the way her sisters carefully avoid looking at her, even though she, too, keeps her gaze down. She can’t even bring herself to look at Anacostia, though normally, this is the part where she’d remind her, none too kindly, that _the witchbomb has a name._ Because one of the things they’ve all avoided discussing since they got back to Fort Salem is not only _how_ Raelle managed a witchbomb on her own—counter to all of what they thought were the rules of this power—but how much of that information they trust Anacostia with.

After everything Anacostia’s done for them, Raelle knows that she owes her a certain amount of trust. And she does trust her—at least enough to put her life in her hands, every single time she takes them into battle. She knows that Anacostia loves them, in her way, and doesn’t want any harm to come to them. And all of that _would_ be enough, if Raelle only had her own life to consider.

But Scylla’s life, and Abigail’s and Tally’s—those have been in Raelle’s hands, too, since the moment she made her deal with Alder. And when it comes to the lives of these three people, the only hands Raelle can afford to trust are her own.

So she hesitates. And it’s absolutely the wrong move, because in that hesitation, Anacostia has time to figure out that something’s up—her bullshit detector probably ringing alarm bells with every word Raelle doesn’t say. She huffs out an impatient breath of air, then locks eyes with Abigail—guessing, Raelle thinks, and _correctly_ , that she’ll be the one most likely to fold.

“Tell me,” she says through her teeth.

“It was me,” Scylla interjects.

She says it so quietly that at first, Raelle’s sure she must have misheard. When she realizes a split second later that no, she didn’t, she looks at Scylla incredulously, but Scylla doesn’t react. She swipes her thumb once over Raelle’s knuckles—a comfort and an apology—and keeps her eyes, guileless blue, on Anacostia.

“Tally couldn’t do it,” she says. Her tone is breezy, but Raelle knows she means for it to wound. “So I stepped in instead. Am I not authorized for that?”

She lifts a single eyebrow. It’s meant as a challenge to Anacostia, which is one of _many_ reasons why Raelle should not be so turned on by it. But. Well.

She’s never really in complete control of herself, when it comes to Scylla.

By the look on Anacostia’s face, it’s clear she isn’t completely buying the act. But she, too, has a way of being thrown off her guard by Scylla: that impertinence Raelle loves is to Anacostia a bit of an Achilles’ heel, and even now, it easily distracts her. “You are _not_ authorized to perform difficult, dangerous Work when you’re already injured from difficult, dangerous Work,” she snaps. “You know that.”

“ _Failing_ to perform it,” Tally mutters from the floor.

“Craven, another word and I’ll demerit you.” Anacostia closes her eyes, as if she’d like nothing more than to open them and have the four of them just be _gone_. But Anacostia’s a soldier, too, and she presses on gamely: “Ramshorn, you in particular are supposed to know better than that. If your actions have led to you being compromised—”

“Wait a minute.” Abigail’s been mostly silent, content to watch Anacostia’s disapproval flit from one of her sisters to the other; but now, it seems, she can’t help herself. “If Necro’s been compromised, how are we going to get our intel?”

For a single, traitorous moment, Raelle wonders the same thing. It’s been one of their main obstacles all along: the secrecy surrounding the work they do means they can’t get their intel from anyone in Intelligence. It’s always been all on Scylla, and if Scylla’s been compromised…

“She hasn’t,” Raelle says, interrupting her own thoughts. Her words come out more harshly than she intended, and Abigail looks at her in surprise. “The Fixer looked at her. She said she couldn’t find anything wrong.”

She looks at Scylla for confirmation, but Scylla just gives her a vague little smile and shakes her head. That’s when Raelle knows she’s losing her again—losing her to that thing she sometimes does, where she turns her attention inward and just shuts out everything else. It’s a self-defense maneuver, probably learned during those nebulous years after her parents were murdered, but before she came to Fort Salem. She’s good about hiding it, so that it isn’t obvious when she’s slipping away, but Raelle has learned to see the signs: the glassy expression with the little half-smile. The vacant look in her eyes, like she’s projecting herself somewhere outside her body. The way she obsessively worries her lower lip between her teeth.

The way, sometimes, she doesn’t hear it at first when Raelle calls her name.

That part, more than any of the rest put together, breaks Raelle’s heart a little.

“The Fixer said she wasn’t sure,” Abigail says gently.

Raelle scoffs at that. The head Fixer hadn’t known any more than the rest of them—had simply been baffled, when they tried to describe the song the Camarilla had been singing. “And you didn’t recognize _any_ of it?” she kept repeating. “Couldn’t pick out any of the seed sounds?” When she’d finally put her hands on Scylla to open up a link, it was first with a look of disapproval at Raelle: “I can’t do this with you hovering over her,” she’d complained.

If Abigail hadn’t intervened just then—cutting in with a smooth, “Yes, ma’am,” and gently tugging Raelle away—Raelle really, truly thinks she might have punched the head Fixer.

She’d felt slightly more charitable toward her a few minutes later, when she disengaged from Scylla and declared that she could find no trace of a foreign element in her mind. And because she was more concerned with Scylla at that moment—Scylla, who’d been too quiet, too stoic, throughout the whole exam—it’s _possible_ she let the head Fixer’s next remark, slip right over her.

But Abigail seems bound and determined to remind her of it now. And so Raelle glares back at her—not because she thinks she’s _wrong_ , but because Scylla looks so small and fragile beside her: still in her muddy riot gear, with that awful, neutral look glassing over her face. And even though Raelle’s certain she’s all right (refuses to be anything _other than_ certain), there’s a thread of doubt that won’t stop running through her mind no matter how hard she tries to shove it away. Abigail means well, Raelle knows, but also, right now, she just sounds like one more voice with the power to hurt Scylla—even if, as Raelle knows well, Scylla would never admit to it.

It also doesn’t help that she’s giving Raelle a soft, pitying look. Not when she _knows_ Raelle can’t stand being pitied.

“The Fixer said we can’t be sure, if we don’t know _what_ he was singing—”

“ _The Fixer said she’s fine_ ,” Raelle repeats stubbornly. “I don’t see why we need to talk about this right now.”

“Raelle—”

“Can I just ask something?”

This now from Tally, in that new, dangerous tone of hers. Raelle and Abigail exchange glances—a momentary truce—and even Anacostia looks uneasy. “Private Craven—” she attempts.

But Tally rolls right over her as if she hasn’t spoken at all. “No,” she says, her voice getting louder, “what I wanna know is why Scylla’s allowed to be here at all right now if she might be compromised.”

It’s the way she says the last bit, _if she might be compromised_ , that finally tips Raelle’s hand. “God, Tally, _shut up!”_ she snaps.

And for a second, she regrets it. For a second, watching Tally’s face go slack with surprise, Raelle wants to take it back immediately. It’s on the tip of her tongue, even—before the words have even cooled in her mouth—but then, in the blink of an eye, Tally’s face smooths over again, and the hard look from before is back in her eyes, sharp and glittering.

“What, because she’s your girlfriend, we’re not allowed to—?”

“This has nothing to do with that—”

“ _Enough!”_

For all her drill-sergeant intensity, it’s rare for Anacostia to actually raise her voice in anger. The effect of it is immediate and startling: all three of them fall silent at once. Raelle’s fists clench reflexively against the blanket, but she doesn’t dare move any more than that. Whatever else she’s become, she was trained, first and foremost, as a soldier.

So well-trained, in fact, that she doesn’t turn her head when she hears Scylla slip out of the bed beside her. Her focus is entirely on Anacostia—who’s letting them dangle on the hook a little, she’s sure, before she chews them all out. It’s not until she hears Scylla’s voice cut through the quiet that she notices what’s going on.

“Well, ladies,” she says brightly. Now that she’s upright she looks slightly less weak and diminished than she did before, but there’s less enthusiasm to her snark than normal, and Raelle knows that’s very, very bad. “This has been _such_ a pleasure. So sorry to have to leave so soon.” Her gaze narrows in on Tally and goes cold. “I’m sure a Knower can figure out what to do without me, though.”

And without waiting for Tally to reply—without a backward glance at any of them, even Raelle—she saunters out of the suite, with a devil-may-care calm that, Raelle knows, is completely at odds with what she’s feeling. She finds her voice then: “Scyl, _wait_ ,” she pleads, but it’s no use; when Scylla goes inward, to that place Raelle hates, nothing and no one can reach her. Not if she doesn’t want them to.

She moves to follow her out, to chase her down the hall and make her _stay_ , somehow, but Anacostia’s voice stops her in her tracks.

“Private Collar,” she sighs. Her eyes are closed again. One hand is pressed lightly to her temple. “Do _not_ make me say it.”

And so Raelle doesn’t. She takes a last, agonized look at the door Scylla left through, then does what a good little soldier is supposed to. What she tells herself she _has_ to, in order to keep her unit together and Alder off their backs: stand up straight, shut her mouth, fall in line.

Remind herself she’d do a lot worse than that, if it meant keeping Scylla safe.

None of it makes it any easier to let her walk away.

~*~

Anacostia finally lets them go just before the fifteen-minute warning bell starts tolling.

“Training at _nine_ tomorrow,” she calls at their retreating backs. “I expect you all to have your shit together by then.”

Her reproachful gaze follows them out the door and into the quiet of the infirmary, but Raelle barely feels it. She’s suddenly full of energy, practically weightless with the freedom that comes with finally being dismissed. It’s like she has permission to let a little of today slough off her shoulders, and as she runs back to Medea barracks—heedless of Abigail and Tally behind her—it’s with a spring in her step that, even just an hour ago, would have felt impossible.

Scylla’s not in her room when Raelle finally makes it to their floor (slightly winded from running up seven flights of stairs). It’s not exactly a surprise—when Scylla gets upset or overwhelmed, it’s hard for her to stay in one place—but it does make Raelle uneasy. She knows that Scylla’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself, and that the only thing she’s likely to encounter out on the grounds is a pissed-off patrol, but her nighttime wanderings never sit easily. Especially not now, after what happened today with the Camarilla.

But there’s nothing Raelle can do. She could turn around right now, of course—go charging back into the night and fumble her way through the darkness and the woods until she found her—but she knows Scylla wouldn’t necessarily thank her for that. Not if what she needs right now is space.

Raelle’s never been very good at refusing Scylla anything.

She goes to the shower block instead, and sets the water to a punishing temperature. The lights above the stalls are a harsh fluorescent that make her skin look sickly yellow; she stands beneath the spray and lets several inches of dirt slip from her skin and swirl down the drain, all the while examining her hands under that jaundiced light. They look so naked without the gloves—moon-pale and calloused and _hers_. Hers, still. It’s hard even now to imagine them as separate from her in any way. Even though what happened today was _definitely_ outside her control.

Even though the right hand looks noticeably worse than it did yesterday.

She stays in until the water runs cold, and the motion-sensing lights switch off, leaving her for a split second in darkness. After that, she takes her time getting dressed, putting in the extra effort to re-braid her hair even though the gloves make her fingers thick and clumsy. But even after she’s lingered as long as she can, Scylla’s not back; and the prospect of returning to her own room—which Raelle uses mainly as a place to store her clothes—is too depressing.

She lets her gaze slide further down the hall to Tally’s door. Raelle didn’t wait for her or Abigail after Anacostia dismissed them; she was too desperate to find Scylla, and, if she’s honest, too annoyed at them both for driving her away in the first place. But she knows Tally’s probably in her room now, and that she’s probably alone—alone with whatever dark thoughts have been plaguing her ever since she came back to them. The things she still refuses to talk about with anyone.

Raelle knows that, and yet, she can’t make herself go over and knock on the door. The memory of Tally’s eyes so hard on Scylla hasn’t yet cooled, and Raelle can’t subject Tally to the things she knows she might say. Which leaves her with one other option.

She’s only a little surprised when Adil’s the one to answer her knock.

“Hey,” she says, trying to peer around him into Abigail’s room. “Abigail here?” She can never quite figure out what it is that’s between them—if it’s just sex or if it’s _romantic_ or whatever—but more and more, Adil seems to just be _around_. She tried to ask Abigail about it once, but Abigail refused to discuss it. Raelle suspects it’s because she doesn’t know the answer herself.

Now here Adil is again. “Raelle, hey,” he says. There’s a weird, nervous energy coming off of him. He’s pretty shy to begin with, but this is more intense than his usual baseline; he can’t seem to look her in the eye. “Sorry, I was just—”

“No, no, you don’t have to—”

But he’s already out the door, giving her a little halfhearted wave over his head as he makes for the stairs. He and Khalida have their rooms on the sixth floor, with the rest of the Tarim refugees; only Strike Team Moirae is important and secretive enough to be separated from everyone but themselves.

Raelle still remembers Abigail’s reaction when she heard they were going to be housed in Medea. “The isolation barracks,” she’d said, rolling her eyes like it merely amused her. “With the Necros and everyone else who’s too weird for gen pop.”

And for once, Raelle hadn’t challenged her, even though that stinging indictment had technically included Scylla. Because she knows, however much Abigail tries to pretend otherwise, being separated from the rest of the base—from the world she’s been immersed in her whole life, long before actually coming to Fort Salem—really, really bothers her.

Now, she pokes her head into Abigail’s room and sees her lounging on her bed like she hasn’t got a care in the world. When she sees Raelle in the doorway, she just raises her eyebrows at her. “You coming in, or what?” she says.

Raelle eases the door gently shut behind her and glances around. Even now that she’s got her own room, Abigail’s tidy and spartan to a fault: there’s nothing on the desk or the walls to suggest any kind of personal touch. Even her bed is made up with hospital corners.

“Hope I didn’t _interrupt_ anything,” she teases.

Abigail snorts, as if the very idea of sleeping with Adil is absurd—and not, you know, something Raelle knows for a _fact_ she does regularly. “Only the usual,” she sighs, in a theatrically put-upon tone. “Alder’s trying to send him on ops with us, he doesn’t want to, Alder insists, he refuses, and the whole thing starts all over again.”

“Alder’s trying to send him on _ops_ with us?” This is the first Raelle’s hearing of it. “ _Why?_ Men don’t even—”

Abigail waves her off. “Why do you think?”

Raelle doesn’t even have to guess. “His songs.” It would be just like Alder to try and force the songs out of him by putting him in a life-or-death situation; the woman, as Raelle knows well, is ruthless when it comes to protecting her own. Apparently, she’s decided that her own can’t be protected without these specific songs.

“Point to the tiny Cession shitbird.” Abigail regards her for a moment. “Gotta say, Collar, I’m surprised to see you here.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Mhm. Thought for sure you’d be busy with some damage control.”

“You mean cleaning up your mess?” Raelle sits at the foot of Abigail’s bed, pushing her legs out of the way to make more space. “Thought I’d come yell at you for making it in the first place instead.”

The words come out gentle, almost teasing. Raelle’s surprised to discover that she means them, too; that her irritation, with Abigail at least, has all but dissipated, leaving a softer emotion in its place. If she had to put it into words, she’d call it the eleventh hour of a slumber party: that liminal space where everything’s sleepy and blunted and honest. She feels, right now, like she could tell Abigail anything.

It’s been like this between them ever since they both died.

“There you go again, talking about other people’s messes.” Abigail shakes her head and chuckles. “Like I don’t spend my whole life cleaning up after yours.” She fixes Raelle with a serious look that lasts for about two seconds before they both dissolve into giggles.

“Seriously, though,” Abigail says, once they’ve collected themselves. “You know I didn’t have shit to do with all that stuff with Scylla.”

“All right, maybe not,” Raelle concedes, because in this slumber-party atmosphere, it costs her nothing to admit someone else is right. “You could be nicer to her, though. You and Tally both.”

“I’m nice enough.”

“You call her _Necro_ to her face. I don’t think I’ve ever even _heard_ you use her first name.”

“It’s what she _is!_ She’s Necro! You want me to call her Blaster? _That_ would be wrong.”

Raelle laughs helplessly, because it’s just so _ridiculous_. “Of course not,” she says. “Just—I dunno.” She can’t seem to fit words to what she’s feeling. _You don’t have to treat her like she’s radioactive_ , she could say; or, _please just try and trust her. For me._

Or, mortifyingly embarrassing, but no less honest: _Aren’t we all supposed to be a family now?_

She doesn’t say any of those things.

“Look.” Abigail’s still grinning, but something’s shifted in her eyes. Raelle doesn’t give any indication of having noticed—Abigail would hate that—but she immediately pays attention. “I know I can be a lot. To all of you. But I sort of _have_ to be a lot.” She pauses, like she’s carefully choosing her next words. “I’m really not trying to sound like an asshole right now, but I’m under…not _worse_ pressure than the rest of you. But different. More.”

And Raelle nods, because she knows it’s true. Abigail’s still their unit leader. And more than that: she’s still a _Bellweather_. Both of those things are more complicated than Raelle thinks she’ll ever understand.

“Spoken to your mom lately?” she asks quietly.

Abigail shakes her head, not meeting Raelle’s eye. “Not since our last _discussion_ ,” she says lightly.

Raelle winces. She remembers the fallout of that discussion all too well. Petra Bellweather’s one of a very few people who actually knows about Strike Team Moirae—knows about it, and has made no secret of wanting her daughter removed from it. Apparently, unit leader of a special task force means nothing if the task force can’t even be publicly acknowledged. If all that the rest of the base knows—is _allowed_ to know—is that the daughter of General Bellweather will not be attending War College.

However much pressure Abigail’s already dealing with as unit leader, the flak from her mother—and the possibility of a stunted career—has got to be so much worse.

So Raelle tells her, “We’re really lucky to have you, Abs,” because it’s true, and because she’s sure Abigail isn’t reminded of it nearly enough. And Abigail shakes her head again, but there’s a small smile playing on her lips, and just that tiny gesture makes Raelle think that maybe they _will_ be okay.

“My motivational speech today was pretty shit, though,” Abigail says, still grinning a little. “Wasn’t it?”

“No,” Raelle replies, struggling to keep a straight face. “No, it was great, Abi, really. I mean, the point _was_ to make us all want to give up and die, right?”

“ _Goddess_ , you’re the worst.” Abigail’s laughing again. “This unit unity stuff is all Tally. Definitely not _my_ forte.”

“Tally would be an amazing motivational speaker,” Raelle agrees, still trying for lighthearted. But it’s like someone’s dumped a bucket of ice water on the whole conversation: their laughter dies in their throats, and the silence that settles between them no longer feels easy.

“She’s a mess, Rae,” Abigail says at last.

Raelle nods without looking at her. “I know.” As much as she loves sitting here with Abigail, laughing over stupid things like they’re still the dumb kids they were in Basic, she’s never not aware of the gaping hole where Tally ought to be. There’s a lump in her throat she has to swallow around before admitting, “I don’t know how to fix her.”

“Do you think we should go talk to her?” But there’s doubt in Abigail’s voice even as she suggests it, and Raelle knows that she can’t face the thought any more than Raelle could.

“No,” she says definitively. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Okay, but, to be fair, you’re probably more pissed at her—”

“It’s not that.” And it isn’t. Raelle _is_ pissed at Tally, but not at _their_ Tally—the Tally who she sometimes thinks got sucked away from them along with her youth, and wasn’t put back quite right. _That_ Tally, she has to believe, is still trapped somewhere within _this_ Tally. It’s just a question of how to get her out.

A question none of them have been able to find the answer to.

“We’ve gotten it wrong so many times,” Raelle says; out of the corner of her eye, she sees Abigail nodding. “We’ve tried to understand what she’s going through, but now I’m not sure if we even _can_.” She turns then to look Abigail in the eye. “And I can’t help but feel like we’re making it worse every time we fail.”

Abigail leans back on her elbows and studies the ceiling.

“War turns us all into people we don’t recognize,” she says at last. It’s a strange thing to hear coming from _Abigail_ ; Raelle finds herself holding her breath waiting to hear what comes next. “Tally was linked to Alder. The things she must have seen…” She shrugs. “Well, it’s no wonder _we_ don’t recognize her, either.”

Raelle nods. She doesn’t know what else to say, not when Abigail’s put it all so much better than she ever could. What she settles on, lamely, is, “This _sucks_ , Abi.”

Abigail raises an imaginary cup in a toast. “I hear you,” she agrees. “That whole group-hug thing was _very_ misleading.”

~*~

Some time later—after Abigail’s kicked her out with a good-natured command to “Stop _stalling_ , shitbird”—Raelle finds herself outside Scylla’s door for the third time that night. This time, though, when she knocks, the door nudges open slightly at her touch; and a thin book Raelle recognizes from the shelf over Scylla’s desk falls from the doorjamb to her feet.

And Raelle can’t help grinning a little, because this is something Scylla habitually does for her—props the door open with whatever’s on hand if she thinks Raelle’s going to be late. It’s such a small gesture, but it always, _always_ makes Raelle’s heart beat a little bit faster. Especially after the way they left things today.

Because it’s a reminder that, at the end of the day, all Scylla really wants is Raelle: here with her in her room and in her bed. And _that_ , even after all this time, feels nothing short of miraculous.

Suddenly, the idea of spending one more _second_ lingering in the hall is abhorrent. Raelle gently kicks the book back into the room, then slips inside after it, closing the door behind her with as little noise as she can manage.

It’s dark in Scylla’s room, but the curtains are flung wide around the window, and the moon is full. Silvery bars of moonlight are cast over everything: the desk with its piles of books, mostly Scylla’s; the tornado of clothes in the middle of the floor, mostly Raelle’s; the two pairs of boots thrown carelessly next to the door. It exists somewhere at the intersection of mess and order, but the overall impression it gives off is one of chaos. Or, more precisely: exactly what you _would_ expect, from a room Raelle lives in when she’s technically not supposed to.

But none of that matters right now. Right now, Raelle only has eyes for Scylla—curled up on her side in the middle of the bed, with moonlight gently gilding the side of her face. She’s so utterly mesmerizing that Raelle momentarily forgets how to do anything except stare at her: the gentle curl in her hair and the freckles on her arm and the way her eyelashes fall against her cheek.

When she remembers how to function, she quietly makes her way over to the bed, stripping down to just her t-shirt as she goes. She can tell by the pattern of Scylla’s breathing that she’s not quite asleep yet, but still, when she touches Scylla’s shoulder she’s gentle, careful not to startle her.

“Hey,” she whispers. “It’s me.”

Scylla blinks up at her for a second, bleary with thwarted sleep. After that, though, she rolls wordlessly on to her side, making room for Raelle to slide in behind her. Which Raelle does: gathering Scylla into her arms and drawing their bodies flush together, her front to Scylla’s back, her breath fanning across Scylla’s neck. Scylla’s t-shirt has slipped from her shoulder—it might, now that Raelle thinks about it, actually be _her_ t-shirt—and there’s a constellation of freckles there. Raelle has to bite down on her lip to resist the urge to kiss them.

“I’m sorry,” she says instead, because that’s the first, most important thing she needs to do. Even with Scylla pressed up against her, she can _feel_ the weight of this thing between them like a third presence in the bed. Her voice sounds loud in the quiet of the room, even muffled as it is against Scylla’s neck. “About everything that happened back there. I’m sorry.”

When Scylla doesn’t answer immediately, Raelle _does_ press a tentative kiss to her shoulder, drawing Scylla further into the cradle of her body. And Scylla sighs—a sound of bone-deep exhaustion—before turning in Raelle’s arms to face her, their noses barely an inch apart.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she says, not quite meeting Raelle’s eye. “Things just got…hard for me, in there. It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have left.”

And Raelle nods like she understands, even while knowing that she couldn’t ever possibly hope to. Not really.

They all sacrificed things in order to stay together, but Scylla threw herself willingly back into the arms of the people who killed her parents. Raelle can see the way that weighs on her—wonders, sometimes, even, if it’s the thing that’s messing with her Work. Whatever the case, it’s a debt Raelle can’t ever hope to repay.

All she can do is keep loving her—determinedly, unflinchingly, single-mindedly loving her—and hope it somehow ends up being enough.

“But I should have come after you. You were hurting, and I just let you go.” Raelle can’t resist the impulse to touch her while she speaks; her hands move almost of their own accord, skimming Scylla’s neck and her arms and her back, everywhere she can reach. She didn’t realize, till now, how badly she needed the proof of physical touch, to convince her that Scylla’s really all right.

Scylla hums with pleasure at her touch and presses their foreheads lightly together. “You did what you had to do,” she says with her eyes closed. “You can’t give Anacostia any more reason to think the team can’t work. I get that. I _do_.” She looks up, then, turning the full power of those eyes on Raelle, and, just like she does every single time, Raelle temporarily forgets how to breathe. “You want to protect us. That’s what you do. That’s who you are.”

Raelle makes a rueful noise in her throat and moves her left hand to scratch lightly at the back of Scylla’s neck. “I’m not so sure I _know_ who I am anymore,” she admits. She’s thinking of the mycelium—of her right hand sheathed in its glove—of all the things she can’t quite bring herself, even now, to talk to Scylla about.

And of the way, too, that the world seems to constantly be forcing her to choose between it and Scylla. It’s like being adrift in the middle of a river: on one side, there are civilians who despise her kind, witches who would turn her into their weapon, and sisters who want things she can’t give them.

And on the other, just this. A warm bed, and her arms full of the girl who loves her.

The choice ought to be easy, Raelle thinks. But the world is so much more powerful than just the two of them, and it doesn’t take kindly to _not_ being chosen.

“I think all of us feel that way,” Scylla says, drawing Raelle out of her own thoughts. Gently, she reaches out to cup Raelle’s face between her hands, and Raelle shudders at the coolness of the touch. This far into October, it seems like Scylla’s cold all the time, even though heat’s pumping steadily through the vents in the floor.

“Abigail said war turns us all into people we don’t recognize.” She’d made it sound like a bad thing, Raelle thinks—a monstrous sort of transformation. But looking at Scylla’s face, Raelle can only see the girl she loves. She traces a finger lightly over her, mapping the ridges of her cheekbones and the point of her nose, and even though she knows better—knows Scylla’s done her share of horrible, unforgivable things—right now, it’s very hard to imagine anything about Scylla being monstrous.

“Abigail’s right.” There’s a bitterness in Scylla’s tone that makes Raelle pause in the middle of her ministrations. “I never imagined I’d be back here. That I’d ever work _willingly_ for the same people who—” She shrugs, her gaze darting away, and Raelle doesn’t say a word. Just pulls her closer, holds her tight until the rest of her words come trickling out on their own.

“But I’m doing it.” Scylla looks back up at her with a determined look in her eye. “Because I love you. And because if I don’t…if _we_ don’t do this, really bad things will happen.”

Raelle presses her lips to Scylla’s forehead. “I love _you_ ,” she murmurs against her skin. “And I know how hard this is for you. I wish there was a way I could make it easier. Even just to make Tally—”

“Raelle.” Scylla makes her look her in the eye again. “It’s okay. You can’t control Tally. And you can’t protect me from every little thing. That’s not how it works.”

“I want to, though.”

“I know.” Scylla gives her a wicked little grin, gazing up at her through her eyelashes. “But you don’t have to worry. I’ve been told I’m pretty intimidating myself.”

“ _Intimidating_ , huh?”

In one smooth motion, Raelle rolls them over so she’s on top of Scylla, propping herself up on her forearms. Scylla laughs, throwing her head back against the pillow, and when Raelle gently tugs at the hem of her shirt, she lifts her arms up easily to help her take it off.

“Intimidating,” she repeats, a little more breathless than before. Her chest is heaving a little, and Raelle has to force herself not to stare. “Some might even say terri—” But then Raelle kisses her, and the rest of the word is swallowed beneath the pressure of their mouths, drowned out by the little whimper that leaves Scylla’s throat when they come up for breath.

“Raelle,” she gasps. Her eyes are fairly luminous in the moonlight. Where their bodies meet, Raelle can feel her heartbeat racing inside her chest. She doesn’t sound a bit tired anymore.

Raelle herself feels more alert than she has in hours, all remaining traces of sleepiness burned away by this new, all-consuming urgency. It’s been days since she’s had a proper bed to sleep in, let alone a chance to touch and kiss Scylla like this—slowly, like they have all the time in the world. Like the morning isn’t careening toward them even now, with all of today’s problems plus whatever new ones may come.

So she kisses a lazy path from the corner of Scylla’s mouth to her jaw, nipping at the spot behind her ear that makes Scylla cry out and arch her back, drawing their hips flush together. One of Scylla’s hands slips under her shirt, stroking her back, and Raelle presses her face into Scylla’s neck for a moment, overcome.

“You smell good,” she mumbles, darting her tongue out for a taste of Scylla’s skin.

Scylla laughs shakily beneath her. “So do you,” she teases. “I can’t _prove_ anything, but I _think_ that’s what happens when you take a shower.”

Raelle laughs into the crook of her neck. Back-to-back ops are always brutal, but the thing she might hate the most is the lack of access to a shower.

“Shower, huh?” she husks next to Scylla’s ear, biting down gently on the lobe. “Never heard of that. Maybe you could _show_ me what you mean, sometime.”

Scylla giggles at that, wrinkling her nose in a way that makes Raelle weak. “I don’t think that was as sexy as you wanted it to be,” she says.

“No?” Raelle raises an eyebrow at her and slowly brings her thigh up to press against Scylla’s center. The effect is immediate: Scylla _mewls_ and throws her head back, her fingernails digging _hard_ into Raelle’s shoulders.

“Doesn’t _seem_ like sexy is a problem,” Raelle says. She’s having a hard time keeping her voice steady—she can feel through her underwear how wet Scylla is already—but she can never resist an opportunity to be a smug little shit. Especially when it has the delicious effect of making Scylla shiver _while_ she’s rolling her eyes.

“ _Raelle_ ,” she pleads, bumping her hips up again to rock herself against Raelle’s thigh. “Please.”

Raelle grins and leans down to kiss her again, reaching for her wrists to pin them above her head. Her mind’s in such a fog of lust, so drunk on Scylla squirming and whimpering beneath her, that it takes her a moment to notice that Scylla’s gone still. Which is enough time for Scylla, with a strength that surprises Raelle, to flip them over, straddling Raelle’s hips and holding Raelle’s right hand between both of hers.

Her right hand, which, Raelle only now notices with dismay, is still wearing its glove. She’s grown so accustomed to wearing it everywhere, she didn’t even think before putting it back on after her shower.

Scylla gives her a wounded look that cuts Raelle to the quick. But she still waits for Raelle’s permission, and after a terse second, Raelle nods once, tightly, and lets Scylla pull the glove off her hand.

“ _Goddess_ ,” Scylla says softly, forcing Raelle’s eyes to meet hers in the half-dark. “How long?”

Instead of answering right away, Raelle follows her gaze to her hand. The moonlight’s hitting it at the perfect angle, so that the necrosis in her forefinger looks almost beautiful—silver instead of gray with rot.

“Not long,” she hears herself say at last. “It came and went for a couple of weeks. It’s only the past few days that it’s been—spreading.” What she doesn’t say is that before, it was contained just to her right forefinger; in the shower she saw that the rot is slowly creeping down her palm.

She doesn’t know what that means, but she’s pretty sure it’s nothing good.

Scylla makes a pained sound in her throat. “Raelle—”

“Scyl, it’s really not that bad.”

“It’s _decaying_ ,” Scylla says sharply. All the flirtation is suddenly gone from her tone, and it’s jarring. “Have you had someone look at this? A Fixer? Or maybe Izadora could—”

“It’s _fine_ , Scylla.” Raelle has no idea if it’s true or not, but she can’t stand the panic in Scylla’s voice. “It got like this before, after I touched the mother mycelium the first time. It went away after that first witchbomb.”

“And just when were you thinking _this_ was going to go away?”

“It doesn’t hurt.” Raelle knows that’s really not what Scylla’s concerned about; it’s a blatantly transparent attempt to placate her, but she presses on doggedly. “I just don’t wanna gross anybody out, so I keep my gloves on. That’s all.”

Scylla sinks back on her haunches, taking the bulk of her weight off Raelle’s hips. It’s incredible, Raelle thinks blearily, how fucking turned she is right now, just from the image of Scylla straddling her hips—even though the Scylla who’s straddling her hips is _furious_.

“I _knew_ you were hiding something,” she fumes. “You’re really not subtle at _all_ , do you know that? I knew you were hiding something, but I assumed you’d eventually _tell_ me what it was.”

She sounds more hurt than angry, in that moment, and Raelle—sensing an advantage—reaches up with her free hand to cradle her face.

“Hey,” she says, “I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have told you what was going on, even if I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

And Scylla’s expression relaxes, just a little. At least she doesn’t try to remove Raelle’s hand from her cheek.

“We don’t lie to each other,” she insists. “ _You_ told me that.”

“I know,” Raelle says. “I know. I thought protecting you—not giving you one more thing to worry about—but that was really dumb, and I’m sorry. _I’m sorry._ ”

It’s the final _I’m sorry_ that seems to do the trick: Scylla’s whole body softens, like she’s been waiting for permission to release her tension, and she lets her weight sink heavily into the palm of Raelle’s hand. “Okay,” she says. “Just— _tell me_ about these things, okay? I’m with you in this. I _want_ to be with you in this. And I can’t be if you don’t tell me when something’s wrong.”

There’s a question in her eyes as she looks at the rot on Raelle’s finger. And Raelle knows she’s thinking about the witchbomb today—how effortlessly it burst out of her, unassisted. She knows because she’s been wondering the same thing, too, but right now, she can’t bear to think about it.

The world needs to wait for a little while longer. Right now, she has Scylla in her arms.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” she promises. “But right now—” Raelle can’t think how she wants to phrase her question, but Scylla’s eyes on her are steady. Patient. “I do want you to be with me,” she manages. “Always. In everything. But, like, right now—can you _just_ be with me? Like, just the two of us? Can please we do that?”

She’s asking Scylla to help her forget, just for tonight. And there’s a flicker of hesitation on Scylla’s face, but as Raelle watches, she nods, and slowly lets an absolutely _filthy_ grin take over her face.

“ _Well_ ,” she drawls. “I suppose I could manage a request like that.” A bit of moonlight catches in her eyes, making them glitter with wicked mischief. Raelle can feel an immediate warm rush between her legs, because she fucking _loves_ this side of Scylla—the one that’s capable of being a smug little shit herself. She’d wonder at how quickly Scylla swung back into this role, but when she looks into Scylla’s eyes, she thinks she can see in them that part of Scylla just wants to forget, too.

“But,” Scylla adds, lazily slapping Raelle’s right hand back onto the bed, “you’re not touching me with _that_.”

And she surges forward to kiss Raelle, biting down hard on her lower lip while her hand slips without preamble down the front of her underwear. The first touch of Scylla’s fingers, sliding messily up through her folds and softly thumbing her clit, wrings an embarrassingly loud keen from Raelle; and Scylla _laughs_ against her shoulder, absolutely pleased with herself, and that just won’t do at all. Raelle loves it when Scylla’s a smug little shit, okay, but she’s not allowed to be _better_ at it than Raelle.

With frankly _heroic_ effort, Raelle flips them back around, pinning Scylla back against the mattress with the weight of her body. Scylla goes docile beneath her so quickly, Raelle’s already looking forward to teasing her about it later; now, she just stares entranced at how she shakes a little with anticipation. Her lips are swollen from kissing and her breath is coming in quick, hot pants, her eyes on Raelle and her hands vined around her neck.

Raelle wonders how the rest of the world thinks it could even _begin_ to compare with this.

She flashes a grin at Scylla before lowering her mouth to her throat, sucking a mark into the side of her neck where she knows it’ll make Scylla squirm. She scatters kisses carelessly over her shoulders and her breasts, nipping at her freckles, taking her time moving lower. Pretending, again, they have all the time in the world.

She breathes over Scylla’s nipple, relishing in the sound she makes before finally hitting her with a comeback: “It’s cute,” she says as she dips her mouth to her breast, “the way you think I need my _fingers_ to make you come.”

And Scylla whines helplessly, threading her fingers through Raelle’s braids. When she pushes down on Raelle’s head, with her hips canting upward and a plea on her tongue, Raelle’s brain goes blissfully, beautifully silent, at last; and all that’s left is is only thing she’s ever really wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> opening quote comes from the absolutely brilliant Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, which if you haven't read......u gotta
> 
> come visit me on Tumblr @vuvalinis and thank you for reading!


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